Arctic Abstractive Industry

by Arthur Mason

The Arctic is a region that is being dramatically altered through climate change, even as extractive industries and the nations that rely on them frame the Arctic as an alternatively valuable or risky frontier. The essays in this Hot Spots series provide an ethnographic unmasking of some of the normative projects that today’s rush for the Arctic entails. They highlight the increasing speed of change in the Arctic; the complex relationship between Arctic inhabitants and their land/seascape; and the possibility of a postdiscursive turn in which managing Arctic risk relies on the shaping of aesthetic experience. Our use of the word abstractive both evokes and departs from extractive. It gestures toward the stakes of rendering embodied knowledge explicit and redistributing calculative capacities from humans to technical systems, thereby instantiating the conditions for control over a valuable and vulnerable North.